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A Defense of Strong Foundationalism

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A Defense of Strong Foundationalism A Defense of Strong Foundationalism Simple questions often have the most awkward consequences. One of the simplest questions that may be legitimately asked of our everyday judgments can be put in four short words: "How do you know?" And the remarkable thing about this question is that it can be iterated: in any normal situation, an answer to the question will be some claim or set of claims that can reasonably be subjected to the same question all over again. Any conversation in which one side sincerely asks this question and the other sincerely attempts to answer it is going to take one of a very limited number of forms. Either the conversation will go on forever, or it will stop. If it goes on forever, either the answerer comes back around in a circle, eventually repeating some of the claims that were initially called into question, or he goes on forever giving endless new reasons for believing the claims put forward earlier. If the conversation stops, either the answerer has just given up (an understandable reaction in everyday life!) or he has reached some claim so basic that he can fairly be said to be justified in believing it without having reasoned his way to it via other beliefs. Foundationalism is the position that all justified empirical beliefs are either basic, in something like the final sense given above, or else have supporting lines of reasons that can be traced one way or another back to beliefs that are basic. It doesn't matter that no two sane people would have a conversation like this: the important point for foundationalists is that for justified beliefs the underlying reasons are there and could be produced, under ideal conditions, if necessary.(1) If we drew a diagram of such a conversation, it would have the form of an upside-down tree, branching out when two or more reasons support a belief at a given point. But ultimately every branch could be traced down to a belief that is basic, a point where that branch of the evidence tree comes to an end. Foundationalists do not all agree among themselves as to just what sort of justification the basic beliefs have to possess, or as to what sort of justifying relations enable us to reason our way from the foundations "up" to our everyday beliefs. Descartes, whose principal work Meditations on First Philosophy is a milestone of foundationalist thought, took a strong position on both points: the basic beliefs must be certainties, and the inference relations leading from those beliefs to higher-level beliefs must be deductively valid, allowing for no possibility of error at any step along the way. But the trend in recent decades has been to weaken both requirements, demanding only that the basic beliefs possess some degree of intrinsic plausibility rather than absolute certainty, and allowing the use of various inference relations that are not air-tight instead of insisting on deductive inference at every step. Robert Audi, a noted contemporary foundationalist, adopts this doubly modest position in reaction to the rather obvious deficiencies of the Cartesian position. Unlike the Cartesian, Audi can make room for justified belief regarding things of which we are not absolutely certain. And the modest requirements he places on basic beliefs allow him to start with a wider set of grounds than the classical strong foundationalist has at his disposal, thereby (apparently) enhancing his chances of providing a really good justification for beliefs about the external world. In both ways, moderate foundationalism seems to be a more desirable position than its austere cousin. What seems to have been overlooked, or at least left unexplored, is a position that separates the two parts of the strong Cartesian position. Audi is certainly right that non-deductive inference relations are necessary for us to arrive at interesting conclusions and that such inferences can have justificatory force. But in contrast to Audi's doubly moderate position I think that Descartes is right about the need for certainties as the bases of empirical knowledge. Though much of our empirical knowledge is of course less than certain, there are compelling reasons to believe that our everyday empirical beliefs rest on a foundation of certainties. Any attempt to revive strong foundationalism will have to answer three obvious questions: Are these strong foundations necessary? Are they available? And are they sufficient to ground empirical knowledge of the everyday sort? I. Are Strong Foundations Necessary? A Modest Proposal If we can give a satisfactory answer to skeptical challenges without insisting on a foundation of empirical certainties, then it certainly makes sense to do so: we take on fewer responsibilities in this sort of argument if we start out making only more modest claims. But if fallible foundations turn out to be inadequate to stop the skeptical regress then we will have to turn to strong foundationalism for a way out. Moderate foundationalism, in its non-skeptical form, maintains that there is a knower S of whom the following claims are all true: 1. S has some basic (i.e. non-inferentially justified) empirical beliefs 2. S has some justified nonbasic empirical beliefs 3. Every branch of an evidence tree supporting any of S's nonbasic empirical beliefs terminates in a basic empirical belief 4. Some of S's basic empirical beliefs are less than certain for S. The crucial point where moderate foundationalism differs from strong foundationalism is, of course, point 4; strong foundationalists will deny this claim while affirming the other three. In order to understand the motivation for strong foundationalism, consider the conversation we started with, picking up at the point where the imaginary conversationalists have gotten down to a basic belief. Knower: ... and I know that because I know that Z. Skeptic: Okay, I can see that Z would be a good reason there -- provided that you really know it. So now, of course, I have to ask: How -- Knower: Stop! You've asked that question dozens of times so far, but this time it won't work. Z is a basic belief: I am justified in believing it, but I don't have or need any argument for it. Skeptic: What kind of crazy position is that? Can you really mean that you just stop somewhere and dig in your heels and refuse to give any further reasons? Knower: No, not at all. What I'm saying is that Z is a belief that I'm justified in holding, not just that it's something I'd like to believe or that my peers let me get away with believing. Skeptic: I guess I see where you're coming from, but now I have to ask: are you really justified in holding Z? Anybody can say, "I'm justified in this belief," and sometimes it may actually be true. But is it true here? The skeptic has a good point; this is a question all foundationalists have to answer. And this is just the point where things begin to get difficult for the moderate foundationalist. Making It All Up If I claim that I have met the Queen of England and you are in a skeptical mood, you may ask me how I know. The typical response for me would be to give you my reasons, but nothing absolutely prevents me from saying, "Oh, I don't have reasons -- I just believe that I've met her." But if I gave this response you would quite reasonably conclude that I am some sort of nut; the belief that I've met a person of such prominence is not the sort of thing one can be justified in believing without having at least some reasons, even if they amount only to faded memories. Anyone who is allowed to get away with this sort of thing can end up claiming to be "justified" in literally any belief. And none of us will take him seriously, for a very good reason: in the absence of any evidence that he really is justified, he may as well be making it all up. There is a tricky point here about what counts as "evidence" that a person is justified in holding a certain belief. Foundationalists all agree that in order to be justified in believing that P, where P is some belief that S has inferred from other beliefs, S needs to be justified in believing the premises from which P has been inferred. To know that S is justified in believing that P, then, I would need to know that S justifiably believes the premises on which it is based, and also that the method of inference being used is a legitimate one -- that the premises really do support S's belief that P. The second part of this can be put more crisply. Epistemologists speak of the connection between premises and conclusions as the sort of thing that can be expressed by an epistemic principle with a conditional form; roughly, if anyone makes such-and-such an inference from justified beliefs, then the person is justified in believing this proposition. For basic beliefs, however, there are no such premises. In this case, the evidence will have to take the form of an epistemic principle regarding the way in which the belief is formed, a principle that states (roughly) that whenever anyone forms a belief in manner X, it is a justified belief. In neither case are we solely concerned with S's evidence for the truth of P; these epistemic principles come in only when we are looking for evidence for the truth of the claim that S is justified in believing that P.
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